House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told Senate Republicans on Wednesday that it would be difficult for him to pass their bipartisan supplemental legislation with aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan and a border security measure through his chamber.
Johnson met with the Senate GOP conference to take questions from members and discuss the latest developments on the appropriations front, though the funding bill was the main topic of discussion, according to six senators in attendance. He could not commit to passing the Senate’s national security legislation, the members said, though he did not explicitly say he plans to separate Israel aid and combine Ukraine assistance with a border bill.
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“For me, I read it as if it’s all together, that’s not going to get to first base over there [in the House],” Sen. Mike Braun (R-IN) told reporters when asked what he took from Johnson’s comments to the group. “He just didn’t think he’d be able with a two to four vote margin to get that done.”
Republicans in both chambers have been in agreement since President Joe Biden sent Congress his $106 billion supplemental request that Ukraine aid be conditioned on a substantial set of border policy changes.
A bipartisan coalition of senators has been working for weeks on a possible border agreement. The talks have centered on possible changes to federal asylum policy and how the Biden administration uses the humanitarian parole authority. Those involved have struggled to reach a consensus on how to approach either.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have been in full support of the effort to combine Israel and Ukraine aid. The two have backed the inclusion of border security, though they differ on some of the policy change specifics. Taiwan assistance was also included to help broaden support for the bill.
That package, which is expected to eventually pass the Senate by a broadly bipartisan margin, could face a tough path forward in the House without a major set of border policy changes. Even if Republicans were to secure concessions from Democrats in the current Senate negotiations, the package would face considerable opposition from House GOP lawmakers who oppose Ukraine aid.
Were Schumer to concede to Johnson and separate out the bills, individual legislation could have a hard time passing on their own in the Senate. Democrats control the chamber 51-49 and would need full party support and nine Republicans to pass legislation altering border policy.
While Republicans control the House 222-213, the GOP conference has fractured in recent months, struggling to coalesce around much of anything since eight of their own helped oust former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) from his leadership post in October.
Senate Republicans acknowledged the disagreements about the best way to pass Biden’s supplemental spending request after the meeting with Johnson, though they and their aides were undeterred. Multiple members pushed back against the notion that Johnson was ruling out the possibility of passing the Senate’s package, while two Senate GOP leadership aides suggested to the Washington Examiner that the House speaker is simply trying to keep his options open.
“I don’t expect him to be able to give a commitment, and I wouldn’t ask him for that commitment when we haven’t done anything on our own,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told the Washington Examiner after the luncheon, adding that the onus was on Schumer to make “a decision about what’s going to be in the bill” and to put the bill forward.
“We have no control over what the House does, and I don’t think Mike can predict what this House is going to do next,” he continued. “I think it’s going to be hard for them to take a bill in a package as opposed to splitting it up, but he didn’t say it would be impossible. He said it would be hard, which is not exactly a newsflash.”
The Senate would be forced to take each of the bills up separately if the House tanked the upper chamber’s supplemental package, something one Republican said would be tricky to accomplish.
The Republican, a member of leadership speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the Senate does not have a clear path to be able to pass the supplemental in pieces. The Ukraine funding would lack GOP votes, but the border funding would cause at least a few Democratic defections.
Packaged together, the measure could have enough votes to cross the finish line in both chambers, though the timing would be far from ideal. The chamber is going to spend December working on the supplemental deal, finishing its appropriations process, and confirming hundreds of stalled military nominations.
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Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), the lead Democrat negotiator on the border deal, acknowledged as much when asked about the potential difficulties of separating the bills.
“The House has the ability to move things in 24 hours. We don’t. We don’t have the ability to move three different pieces of legislation quickly,” Murphy told the Washington Examiner. “So my hope is that we can pass something with a big bipartisan vote in the Senate and that will be a signal to the House that it can also get a big bipartisan passage.”
